Text messaging, such as Short Messages Service (SMS), also known as “texting”, refers to the exchange (i.e., transmission and receipt) of brief written or text messages between digital mobile phones over cellular or other wireless networks. Individual messages are referred to as “text messages” or “texts”. Many service providers or carriers also offer multimedia messaging services, such as Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), that allow for exchange of messages containing multimedia content, such as image, video and sound content. The most common application of the service is person-to-person messaging.
To send such a message, a user types the text into a mobile phone or other text-enabled device, attaches the desired multimedia content, enters one or more phone numbers for the recipients of the message, and sends the message. A SMS or MMS center receives and stores the SMS/MMS message, and then forwards the message to the recipient when the recipient is available.
One problem with such messaging services is that recipients of such messages may without limitation forward them to third parties. While a user may create a customized SMS message that he/she intends for only the intended recipient to receive, the recipient can forward the message to multiple third parties, who may in turn forward the message onto to other parties, and so on.
With the advance in technology that permits texting to include images, photos and videos, a very common practice has arisen called “sexting”, which is slang for the act of sending sexually explicit or suggestive content within or as part of a text message. A genre of texting, sexting involves sending either text, images or video that is intended to be sexually arousing. Many surveys show that an alarming number of children and teens have electronically sent nude or semi-nude images of themselves, and this number is growing rapidly.
Although sexting often takes place consensually between two people, it can also occur against the wishes of a person who is the subject of the content. An increasing social danger with sexting is that material can be very easily and widely promulgated, and the originator has no control over it. There have been many instances which have been reported throughout the news media where the recipients of sexting have shared the content of the messages with others, with less intimate intentions, such as to impress their friends or embarrass the sender, thereby increasing the instances where the intended recipient is not the only one viewing the content. Celebrities have also been victims of such abuses of sexting.
Although many public service advertisements and notices have urged children, teens and the general public to be wary of sexting or of sending any text message that they would not want someone other that the recipient to see, it has proven difficult to prevent individuals from sending these types of text messages. Similarly, it has also proven difficult to prevent recipients from forwarding messages to others.
It is an object of the present invention to prevent the recipient of such text messages from forwarding the message to those who were not intended to see the message in the first place.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a means to prevent the recipient of such text messages from forwarding the message non-intended recipients, where such means are respected by the respective devices as well as by the network service providers or carriers.